I attended an interesting symposium in the Museum for Communication in the Hague this afternoon. It was called ‘Fill the Gap: towards an inclusive information society’ and was to be about the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis about the Information Society and how ICT affects developing countries.
The whole day and especially the information market had a strong focus on developing countries but the speakers approached this subject from a wide variety of perspectives.
Civil Liberties vs. Terrorism: First speaker was Gus Hosein who could not attend the conference because the Canadian government would not renew his passport. He had spent the previous night in his London office making a video presentation to present the issues he wanted to discuss.
He briefly introduced this video over the telephone and then we spent the following half hour watching him orate about online civil liberties and how they are being encroached upon by governments all over the world in the name of the fight against terrorism.
He gave a lot of examples of how things are headed the wrong way.
A main point in his talk were that civil liberties are not relative values but they are absolute rights. Another important point was that it is somewhat understandable that China does not respect civil liberties because they have never had them and do not have a tradition of freedom. That makes it all the more reprehensible that the Free West could knowingly throw its hard earned liberties out the window in the face of relatively minor adversity.
By not simply admitting defeat but using digital video to get the message out anyway, this was a great example of how ICT can enable dialogue. It was a shame they did not get Hosein back on the telephone (or Skype AV) for an interactive session with the audience.
Intellectual Property and Development: The second speaker Willem Grosheide was also not present due to a conflict of schedules or a communications mishap or something. He did his talk live over the telephone which went quite ok.
Most salient thing he told was that the Netherlands itself used a lack of intellectual property (or patent) law to foster its economic growth by copying the industries of Germany and the UK. Only after the Netherlands had grown economically so it could innovate itself, did they deem intellectual property protection necessary and instituted it.
Third world countries should currently be in a similar lawless state to enable them to catch up with the West. Copying Windows and manufacturing AIDS medicine without paying IP fees would greatly help them bootstrap their economies. However most of them have been forced to sign a WTO trade agreement with a clause about IP that prohibits piracy. This forces them to play by the same rules as the West, pay fees they cannot afford to companies who already have lots and lots of money.
Fre for all: After this we had a free session at the information market where there were some people discussing the topic of freedom of speech on the internet.
This discussion was aimless and if they had not stuck to this topic so rigidly it could have been much more interesting. There was one guy (Zoran Djukanovic) who had been to Iraq and Armenia to give ICT advice. I thought he could have much more interesting things to say than to comment on the topic of freedom of speech in a Dutch context.
Most people (myself included) preferred to talk to people while drinking coffee. I talked a bit with various representatives on the information market about their topics. This was mostly about development in third world countries using ICT.
Inclusive Information Society: After the break we had a panel discussion with three people: Edith Mastenbroek (former Xs44all employee and staunch defender of digital liberty), Hans Franken (senator for the CDA and dissonant intelligent voice within that party concering digital law, he is in favour of not intsituting a massive bewaarplicht in the EU) and Paul Maassen (someone from HIVOS).
Because these were all ‘good guys’ there was no heavy discussion but the conversation was really interesting and informative. They discussed the issues of internet access, e-government, public access to scientific research, civil liberties restrictions in the free West and more.
